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McGruber writes "The Rochester (NY) Democrat-Chronicle has the interesting story of the Eastman Kodak Co.'s Californium Neutron Flux Multiplier, which was housed in Building 82 of Kodak Park in Rochester, NY. The multiplier contained 3½ pounds of highly enriched (weapons-grade) uranium. Kodak used it to check chemicals and other materials for impurities, as well as for tests related to neutron radiography, an imaging technique. From the article: 'When Kodak decided six years ago to close down the device, still more scrutiny followed. Federal regulators made them submit detailed plans for removing the substance. When the highly enriched uranium was packaged into protective containers and spirited away in November 2007, armed guards were surely on hand. All of this — construction of a bunker with two-foot-thick concrete walls, decades of research and esoteric quality control work with a neutron beam, the safeguarding and ultimate removal of one of the more feared substances on earth — was done pretty much without anyone in the Rochester community having a clue.'"

"Cue the irrational fears and misunderstanding of these materials and processes while the coal fired power plant burns down the street" music

I suppose now is a bad time to point out that I could have walked into the room, picked up the cylinders of enriched uranium, played catch with them with a friend for awhile, and then tossed them into a lead-lined box for disposal without worrying much about my health. As long as I didn't lick the damn thing or powderize it and inhale it, there's little risk in short term exposure.:\

Those same people who don't complain at all about the propane facilities [firerescue1.com] I drive by regularly.

I think a major part of it is fear of the unknown. When a propane facility lights off, everyone knows exactly where the danger is (the great big fireballs and those metal tanks dropping from the sky). When a radiation accident happens, you can't see the danger and by the time you find out you've been exposed its too late. The danger is the same (probably higher for non-radioactive accidents...) but the fear fa

But you've deprived the NIMBYs from whining and shrieking. Had they known about the presence of this thing right in their back yard it would have provided meaning and purpose for their otherwise useless lives. But now, some unfeeling corporate giant has deprived them of this by removing that threat.

These faceless corporations, with no motivation other than profit (well, OK, its Kodak) have taken something that we hold precious away from us. Our right to bitch.

At school we had radioactive samples to use in science lessons and no-one minded. Most NIMBYs don't have irrational fears like they, they are simply worried about the affect it will have on the price of their house.

They also took away the right for the emergency services workers to be trained and know what they were dealing with in the event of a fire or other situation potentially involving weapons grade radioisotopes.

Um, not really. I knew it was there. Just about anyone who went to college in the area knew it was there - if you were a hard science major. What they didn't do was advertise it. They got regulators to approve it & they put it in - no publicity & no big shouting matches over it.

They also took away the right for the emergency services workers to be trained and know what they were dealing with in the event of a fire or other situation potentially involving weapons grade radioisotopes.

Um, not really. I knew it was there. Just about anyone who went to college in the area knew it was there - if you were a hard science major. What they didn't do was advertise it. They got regulators to approve it & they put it in - no publicity & no big shouting matches over it.

Yeah I suppose your right, I mean after all the other industrial pollution they imposed on the local community what's a little plutonium between friends.

No one seems to get it. It's not the point that the substances were controlled, there wasn't much there or the level of harm, it's that they didn't give a rats ass what the community thought about it. They were going to do what they wanted to do and it's pretty much irrelevant what the community thinks.

They also took away the right for the emergency services workers to be trained and know what they were dealing with in the event of a fire or other situation potentially involving weapons grade radioisotopes.

Think so?

It's possible that emergency services knew what was on site and may even have procedures in place to deal with it. Its also possible that they didn't feel the need to involve every Joe Sixpack in the neighborhood in the details of where a couple of pounds of weapons grade fissile material was located.

And you have to realize that Kodak Park, back then, was big enough to have its own fire department. Not a fire engine. Not a fire house. A fire department with multiple stations throughout the Park, all trained to handle utterly massive hazmat incidents and fires. Kodak Park was the biggest chemical-processing facility this side of the Mississippi... which, of course, includes all of New Jersey. When local fire departments needed hazmat training, they went to Kodak. I worked there; trust me, three kilograms of uranium was probably one of the smallest disaster risks inherent in the operation. Miles of pipelines carrying acids and solvents, massive steam works from a power plant big enough to run a small city... Every day I drove past this gleaming stainless steel tank, think a milk tanker stood on end, labelled "LIQUID NITROGEN—NOT COMPATIBLE WITH LIFE". That was fun on windy days when it would sway, and images from Terminator 2 unavoidably came to mind.

Kodak has its problems and warts, but anyone accusing Kodak of disdain for Rochester is exhibiting an utter ignorance of the histories of Rochester, Kodak, and George Eastman. I'd frankly be hard-pressed to come up with an example of a company that's done more for their community. (Recent run-into-the-ground years excepted...)

Yeah, Kodak NEVER did any wrong right ? How about Rand Street ? How about the dead pets in the basements, stuff seeping up from people's basements, Kodak buying the houses on Rand Street, How about when they got caught and fined by the EPA for illegal dumpin? The high rate of ex employees dying of cancer and the childhood brain cancer clusters found with a square mile of kodak park ? Yeah they did a lot for Rochester.... They also laid off or fired 25% of their workforce at the end of every 3rd quarter

but anyone accusing Kodak of disdain for Rochester is exhibiting an utter ignorance of the histories of Rochester, Kodak, and George Eastman. I'd frankly be hard-pressed to come up with an example of a company that's done more for their community. (Recent run-into-the-ground years excepted...)

Your AC seems to disagree, seems to me to be a long line of disdain happening there. What did you do there - what was your job. Care to answer the AC's comments

Yeah, Kodak NEVER did any wrong right ? How about Rand Street ? How about the dead pets in the basements, stuff seeping up from people's basements, Kodak buying the houses on Rand Street, How about when they got caught and fined by the EPA for illegal dumpin? The high rate of ex employees dying of cancer and the childhood brain cancer clusters found

They also took away the right for the emergency services workers to be trained and know what they were dealing with in the event of a fire or other situation potentially involving weapons grade radioisotopes.

Think so?

It's possible that emergency services knew what was on site and may even have procedures in place to deal with it. Its also possible that they didn't feel the need to involve every Joe Sixpack in the neighborhood in the details of where a couple of pounds of weapons grade fissile material was located.

FROM THE ARTICLE;

Company spokesman Christopher Veronda said he could find no record that Kodak ever made a public announcement of the facility. He also wasn’t sure whether the company had ever notified local police, fire or hazardous-materials officials.

[rolls eyes]A block of enriched uranium isn't much different from a block of regular uranium (it's *slightly* more radioactive), which is to say you could handle it with gloves, hide it under your bed, dress it up like Natalie Portman and have it sitting at your breakfast table while eating your oatmeal, and you would not be in serious health danger. We're not talking plutonium or cobalt-60, here. As long as you didn't powder it (it's pyrophoric) or try to eat it, it is not particularly reactive or dangerous, especially if in a properly shielded container. Sitting in the lab there was no more risk than, say, your average hospital that has a radiation therapy facility. In fact, probably less because of the nature of the isotopes involved (the isotopes in radiation treatment are MUCH more radioactive).

But you've deprived the NIMBYs from whining and shrieking. Had they known about the presence of this thing right in their back yard it would have provided meaning and purpose for their otherwise useless lives. But now, some unfeeling corporate giant has deprived them of this by removing that threat.

Whilst it's unlikely that anything would have happened Kodak went ahead and did what-ever it wanted to do regardless of any perceived or real threat to the local community for 30 years. That pretty much demonstrates disdain towards the community.

These faceless corporations, with no motivation other than profit (well, OK, its Kodak) have taken something that we hold precious away from us. Our right to bitch.

They also took away the right for the emergency services workers to be trained and know what they were dealing with in the event of a fire or other situation potentially involving weapons grade radioisotopes.

Interestingly, in crazy Europe, they have nuclear reactors inside major cities too, and without much controversy or resistance. Most people there do not even know they live a few hundred meters from a potential nuclear ground zero:

There are three reactors in (or very near) Prague, all of them for undergrad and students and powernuke-technicians-in-training to play with. Some material experiments and other studies needing intense radiation are performed there, too. Nobody gives a damn. We should be actually quite proud of them, everything here is home-built. Damned Austrians with their silly alarmist shrieks, though.

Wikipedia lists 29 active and licensed civilian reactors; the majority of them belong to universities. Most were built in the 60's, most are General Atomics TRIGA reactors, and the power outputs range from 1 W to 10 MW. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors [wikipedia.org]

A few other civilian groups are licensed to have nuclear material, and of course other sectors and nations have lots of the stuff. It's really pretty common.

That does not give an exhaustive list - URI, for example, has (had?) not just the "big" one everyone knew about (as listed on that page), but at least one other that I've personally seen (an open-pool reactor with an output on the order of a hundred watts - And for the record, pictures of Cerenkov radiation just don't do it justice); and I recall hearing about (from a reliable source, not student gossip) a third.

MANY universities have reactors on campus. Where do you think we get Nuclear Engineers? I live a couple of miles from the UW-Madison reactor. It's been running for 40 years without issue. http://reactor.engr.wisc.edu/

Yup. IIRC, the commonly used unit 30 years ago or so was the UTR-10 -- "University Teaching Reactor 10". Pretty much any engineering school with a nuclear engineering program back then had one of those hiding some place that was.... umm.... not well advertised. I haven't kept up, but I suspect the same unit or maybe a slightly updated design is still common. It wasn't weapons grade Uranium, though, but certainly fissionable because the whole point was learning to operate a power generation reactor as would be found at an electric utility or on a US Navy vessel.

I wouldn't have known about it at all except that my roommate's girlfriend was a NucE student who trained on it. It's existence wasn't widely known. More students could navigate the steam tunnels than knew how to find the reactor.

QMC (University of:London) used to have a small nuclear reactor in Stratford E15. That's right where the London 2012 Olympic Park has been built. We had a visit there in 1981. They used to heat up a bit of water from the local stream and pour warm water back (kept the frogs happy). We asked "What happens if it melts down?" and the nuclear physicist who was showing us round said, "It's OK, not many folks live nearby.".

The reactor closed in 1982 and was de-commissioned shortly after that.So Usain Bolt won'

WPI did until somewhat recently. Last I heard the removal process was well under way.It was quite old (circa late 1940's) and only could output something like a kilowatt. Never heard of any local protests or anything -- I had some classes in the same building. The funny part about it was all of the warning signs posted mentioning a warning siren that indicated that you should evacuate... there's a whole bunch of machine shops in that building. More than once I walked into the building and thought to myself,

It would be surprising if any engineering or physics student at UCLA did not know about the reactor in Boelter Hall. I saw it on a tour once, though I cannot recall if this was a public tour, or one for students in a specific introductory course for physics majors.

The amount and degree of enrichment (reportedly 93%) of the uranium fuel might not have been widely known.

I'm not so surprised that some rather alarmingly powerful beam sources would be operated quietly by people with atypical sensor needs. I am a bit surprised that 3.5 lbs of highly enriched Uranium would be available to serve as a beam source.

Not telling the neighbors about a scary-sounding piece of industrial/scientific apparatus is one thing, having enough nuclear material to interest a proliferation wonk in your basement, on the other hand, seems like it would raise eyebrows...

I'm not so surprised that some rather alarmingly powerful beam sources would be operated quietly by people with atypical sensor needs. I am a bit surprised that 3.5 lbs of highly enriched Uranium would be available to serve as a beam source.

I'm sure that in 1985 enriched uranium is available in every corner drugstore, but in 1955 it's a little hard to come by.

3.5 lbs? Get another 30 times as much and you'll be close to a critical mass (bare sphere, 85% enriched). 3.5 lbs isn't that dangerous or, by itself, all that interesting from a nuclear weapons proliferation standpoint.

Fission occurred, but it needed to be pumped by an external neutron source and a runaway chain reaction was pretty much impossible. We're only talking about a ~6 cm sphere of it.

It's still probably enough to easily go supercritical and kill you if you compress it sufficiently. It certainly doesn't require a factor of 30; the demon core was only 14 pounds, and killed two people in separate incidents.

Fair enough. So instead of dying, you'd probably just get really, really sick and die of cancer a few years later. The point was that critical mass is only meaningful when no pressure is applied, and that much smaller amounts can become dangerous under the right circumstances.

To put it in context, 3 pounds of Uranium is still more than the portion of the Uranium that actually contributed to the explosive yield of Little Boy (Glasstone and Dolan, Effects, pp. 12–13, as cited by Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] ). There's

If you mean "The actual amount of uranium that underwent fission", then you are correct. However I don't know of a device that can reach 100% efficiency in prompt fission event. I think you'd probably have more fun with the Americium in the core than the HEU (I think the critical mass for Americium is under 6kg). That's a lot of smoke detectors....

sorry, that's urban legend about the "pea sized Americium", the spherical critical configuration for the stuff in smoke detectors, Am241, is over 57 kg. There is a rare form Am241m1 which is in the 9 to 14 kg range (or less with reflector), but no one knows because no kg amounts exist! You can look up these interesting things in wikipedia

I was in Rochester as a small boy in the 1950's, and knew about the reactor from about the age of 4 or so.
As I recall, some of the cooling water drained into a small duck pond (surrounded about the fence). I was told that there was some small amount of radioactivity, although no one much was concerned at the time. At any rate, the main thing that got through my 4 year old mind was that for some reason it was not a good idea to try to climb the fence or get near the ducks.
At any rate, it was generally known, and not a secret.

But if you can't buy it, then gotta make it as this "fusioneer" as described in "Extreme DIY: Building a homemade nuclear reactor in NYC" http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10385853 [bbc.co.uk] (though I have doubts as the experts at Lawrence Livermore been talking for 50 years they should have in 10 years able to demonstrate electric power production from a fusion reactor.) But I guess having a fusion reactor working or not in the basement would be pretty cool.

I don't know much about nuclear engineering, or the subject as a whole, so maybe somebody can jump in here and clarify.

My understanding is that "weapons grade" only refers to a degree of purity, and not to actual intent... but I still have to wonder why they chose to have a "weapons grade" reactor to begin with. What benefits are there to having this as opposed to say standard Uranium reactors?

The University of Maryland (where I graduated) has a research reactor that became higher in profile after the 9/11

My understanding is that "weapons grade" only refers to a degree of purity, and not to actual intent... but I still have to wonder why they chose to have a "weapons grade" reactor to begin with. What benefits are there to having this as opposed to say standard Uranium reactors?

It's a neutron source, not a power-generating reactor. It used a smidgeon (tenth of a gram or so) of Cf-252 to spit out some
initial neutrons, said neutrons being used to kick off a small
(non-self-sustaining) chain reaction in the U-235. The U-235 reaction multiplies the Cf-252 flux by a few orders of magnitude and is the source of the overwhelming majority of the neutron flux. In order to keep such a source compact (and in order to not have to deal with the complications afforded by exposing tons of U-238 to a neutron flux), you probably need to use HEU for such a device.

Once you've got it up and running, you can then use the neutrons to activate other materials and observe the spectra of whatever your neutron-activated target material emits, which probably enables you to know with a very high degree of accuracy, what your target material was made of. Once you're done with it, pull out the Californium and the whole thing shuts itself down.

It's kind of crazy to think that we've got Iran spending so much of their state resources trying to manufacture enriched uranium meanwhile we've got Kodak sitting on 3.5lbs of the stuff in a basement in NY doing rando-tests with it.

Kodak didn't make the HEU, the DoE made the HEU. Kodak was licensed to use it, under very strict controls. It wasn't "hidden in a basement lab", it was buried in a basement for both radiological and security reasons, and it wasn't "forgotten about", its existence just wasn't widely publicized. The DoE knew where it was all the time. It just didn't want to publicize it, for obvious reasons.

A. it isn't a reactor and does not sustain a chain reaction. It is a neutron source only. It does take a bunch of material to produce a strong, continuous neutron beam.

B. Yes, "weapons grade" is just the ratio of U328 vs. U235.

C. A common nuclear reactor that produces heat has nearly zero neutron emissions outside of the reactor vessel. Even open-core reactors where water was used as a moderator did not have strong neutron emissions. The neutrons are kept in the fissionable material (pile, rods, etc.) t

I just found out, after making a wrong turn and then doing a little research, that General Atomics plays with experimental nuclear and fusion reactor prototypes just a few miles down the road from our office building. I think it's really freakin' cool but I sure there would be a big hubballoo if more San Diegans knew about it.

General Atomics plays with experimental nuclear and fusion reactor prototypes just a few miles down the road from our office building. I think it's really freakin' cool but I sure there would be a big hubballoo if more San Diegans knew about it.

It's called General Atomics, for chrissakes. I mean, it's not as though they're disguising it.

Who really cares? This reactor was extremely small and designed to be a neutron source. These kind of things exist in LOTS of places. I knew of two research reactors on campus when I was in college. One was being jack hammered apart and the other was being used for research (the first one's replacement). One time I got to look down into the reactor pool when it was critical, cool blue glow and all.

These things are NOT dangerous beyond their obvious use as a source of material for a dirty bomb so as lo

There are small research reactors all over the place. Your local university might have one. Lots of developing countries have them. They are generally conservatively designed so that overpower is physically impossible, using something like the doppler effect on reactivity to place an upper limit on power. Big deal.

They probably got it on the United Nuclear [unitednuclear.com] web site. I'm sure there's a section under "Radioactive Isotopes" where you can get weapons grade uranium. Or maybe you actually have to call them for that...

Back in its heyday you could smell Rochester on the approach by car from all the caustic chemicals Kodak used in the mass production process. If they're worried about a neutron generator used for metallurgical testing then they should be wearing a gasmask from simply living IN Rochester.

So there was a tiny 3kg uranium pile at Kodak Park... that'd be south and a bit west of the nuclear power plant, and more or less due north from the University's massive laser-pumped fusion reactor that generates temperatures of 200,000,000K. Somehow, I think those of us living in Rochester were already aware of the possibility of an atomic disaster.;)

In the early 80's, fresh from a move to Northern California I took a job ($7.50 an hour or so) working at a lab that did Neutron Radiography. The process and results themselves are actually really cool. We'd test things like turbine blades for jet aircraft for porosity or residual casting material, welding flaws in Space Shuttle engines. Neat stuff. Then, it was sort of off in an orchard area with a few houses around. Now? Subdivisions, crowd it. That being said, it really is a low-impact sort of deal. Fire up the reactor in the morning, work, power it down in the afternoon. Within 20 minutes of shutdown you could walk past the containment wall, peer down into the pool and watch the blue glow fade. Neat job, for someone just exploring their potential career field. Twenty years later, I was back in the radiography field from a medical devices software bent.

This is a neutron source whereby emitted neutrons from u-235 get "amplified" by striking other nuclei. sure, a pot or chamber where "reactions" occur can be called a reactor. but this is not a critical configuration of U-235 such as in a nuclear power plant

Kodak is just using this to cover up the fact they've been experimenting with an intrinsic field test chamber. I'm assuming they want to build a super-powered meta-human to help them in their upcoming patent battles.

So, Iran with its 70+ million population, is sanctioned for building reactor, while in USA individual private companies. Makes sense in global media idiocracy we live in!

Right. Because a tiny research reactor in a federally licensed facility in the US with tight control over its small load of enriched uranium, and which does not breed more weapons-grade material, is EXACTLY THE SAME as a program of large reactors in an unstable nation that's actively trying to develop nuclear weapons. Yeah, that sounds like a problem with the media to me.

So far as I know, nobody cares about the electric plant. It's the *enrichment* plant that everyone is concerned about. With their own centrifuge, there's nothing to stop them from enriching uranium to weapons-grade (80%+) material.

If you go back and read the news more carefully, I think you'll find all the sanctions discussion revolves around the centrifuge.

I suspect if the Fearless Leader of Kodak went on international TV and made a speech about how they were going to wipe "Fuji off the map" to eliminate their problems, someone might have wondered if they really needed that nuclear device. As it is, Iran is likely to get a lot closer to being able to eliminate their Israeli problem once and for all and settle the Palestinian issue - unless of course Israel decides that the survival of their population trumps getting brownie points in the international debati

This is how you discern a conservative: they speculate about things they have no knowledge of, forming conclusions based only on what they believe "ought to be" and then use that speculation as the basis for their beliefs.

This is how you discern a hypocritical asshole: someone who does exactly the thing they're bitching about someone else doing, but without noticing it.

Mutation is responsible for the development of life. It happens regardless of man-made sources of radiation. In general, mutation will not give you a third eye or second head in a single generation. That sort of mutation is extremely unlikely.

As for other sorts of birth defects which would be more likely to be expected from random mutations, those are going to happen whether we use nuclear power or not. Again, mutation is natural and has been happening for a billion years.